I've read the MSDN Article about Solution User Options files
The solution user options file is used to store user preference settings, and is created automatically when Visual Studio saves a solution.
But what sort of settings or information is considered a "user preference setting"? I have a weird issue with one of my Solution files I've received from another company and the only fix seems to be periodically deleting the *.suo whenever the problem occurs. Can't figure out what sort of information is actually stored there though. I know it's nothing important, but I'd still like to know and I cannot seem to find the answer.
Basically the suo file(i.e., Solution User Options) contains the information related to to a user level customization like breakpoints, bookmarks, Outlining, debugger watches etc.
Also note that if you delete the suo file then Visual Studio will create a new one.
Link directly from Microsoft
In addition to what Rahul Tripathi told, suo file also stores
the list of files that are currently open in your editor so that when you relaunch solution after closing it, same files will be shown in the editor to resume our work.
the current active project in the solution, so that when you relaunch it is active again.
To understand better, delete suo file and reopen your project, all the above settings will be lost.
i created a little application (win forms) thats create a solution, adds a project and some files to the project. By clicking a button, the new solution should open by the installed vs2010 express. Thats works fine, everything is ok. My question, is there a way to open a specific file in the solution when the hole solution was loaded? For a better understanding, the user (of my application) creates a sln with 3 files (a.cs, b.cs and c.cs). He selects b.cs (in my application), and opens the sln. In the editor in vs, the preselected b.cs should be open.
I've tried to create a sou - file, but i think thats not the right way...
Is there a way to do this?!
Thx and regards
Sascha
Visual Studio remembers the files you had open when you last closed the solution, along with other things like breakpoints, by using the SUO file. You can check this with a simple experiment: close your solution with just a single file opened inside it (a.cs, for example), manually delete the SUO file (don't worry, VS recreates it if it doesn't exists) and when you open the solution again you'll see you won't have any file opened, and you'd lost any breakpoints you had.
So the obvious thing to do here would be to manipulate the SUO, storing on it the file selected by the user and then opening VS from your tool. The only thing I've found on the documentation is the IVsPersistSolutionOpts but I don't have any direct experience with it.
Also check this CodeProject article: while its main focus is to add a Tool Window to Visual Studio, it also uses IVsPersistSolutionOpts.
I am opening files from a server ASP.net and the VB codebehind files, and my visual studio is not working correctly, Intellisense is dead and if i right click the "Go to defenition" option is disabled. These files are not part of a solution.
This is strange though because it was working properly yesterday. If I create a new project the intellisense works great, yet opening this single file it fails.
I have tried to re enable intellisense by resetting visual studio, I tried editing the text editor settings so that Auto list members and Parameter information are both checked. I even tried installing ReSharper and nothing worked. I have rebooted twice and even tried copying the file to a local drive to work on yet nothing.
Does anyone know why this is happening and what I could do to solve the problem? Im working on a rather complex problem and intellisense would make it a lot easier.
I managed to fix this problem which manifested itself after my ReSharper trial expired.
Steps to fix are:
Tools/Import and Export Settings
Reset all settings
Back up your config
Select your environment settings and finish
Intellisense started working again straight away.
For me simply hitting Ctrl+Alt+Space to re-enable Autocompletion fixed it.
I had the same problem. It only affected one of my solutions. Others seemed fine.
To correct it I deleted the solution's user options file (.suo).
When I opened the solution again, intellisense was working.
For the benefit of searchers, Nicks suggestion is good, but if you don't want to reset all your settings, you could follow the recommendation in this post.
It states - "go to "Tools | Options | Text Editor | C# | General and check the "Auto list members" and "Parameter information" checkboxes"
I should first note that upgrading my RAM from 4 to 16GB seems to have made this issue go away.
Here's the steps I go through:
If only one file/window appears to be affected, close/reopen that file. If that doesn't work, try below.
In Visual Studio:
Click Tools->Options->Text Editor->All Languages->General
Uncheck "Auto list members"
Uncheck "Parameter information"
Check "Auto list members" (yes, the one you just unchecked)
Check "Parameter information" (again, the one you just unchecked)
Click OK
If this doesn't work, here's a few more steps to try:
Close all VS documents and reopen
If still not working, close/reopen solution
If still not working, restart VS.
For C++ projects:
MSDN has a few things to try: MSDN suggestions
The corrupt .ncb file seems a likely culprit.
From MSDN:
Close the solution.
Delete the .ncb file.
Reopen the solution. (This creates a new .ncb file.)
Sometimes, it could be because of different extension style that you are using for the files.
In my case Intellisense is working in all the files except for a file in a different project of the same solution.
When I have changed the extension of the file to cxx from cpp,it started working.
The includes and other files in the solution are of extension .cxx or .txx.
Thank you
Save your solution. Closing the VS2010 instance for this solution and re-oprning worked for me.
Here I assume that Intellisense was working OK but stopped for some unknown reason without changing any default settings.
Prabhdeep
After uninstalling ReSharper, the squigglies that show up underneath a syntax error stopped showing up in the code editor.
This blog post helped me fix the issue.
Try this:
Close any open instances of visual studio, delete the folder 10.0 inside `C:\Users[username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\' and restart the visual studio. Issue will be fixed.
In my case, none of the above worked (although I discovered that sometimes the *.suo file is the trouble maker - in those cases deleting it helps).
I fixed it successfully the following way: Let's assume your solution has the name MySolution. Do the following:
Reset the settings (as described here). Close Visual Studio 2012.
Locate the file MySolution.sln.DotSettings (it is in the same folder as your MySolution.sln file)
Rename or delete it (for example rename it to XMySolution.sln.DotSettingsX so VS won't read it)
Open your solution by double-clicking on the MySolution.sln file
And afterwards Intellisense was working again just fine. I assume the file MySolution.sln.DotSettings got corrupted.
Note: The file MySolution.sln.DotSettings was created and checked in to TFS by a team colleague who had installed ReSharper. The issue occurred on a different PC without ReSharper where the same project was opened.
For me, this was related to an incorrect xaml file build action in an Azure WorkerRole project (bizarre, though it may seem!). Please see my entry in this post if you want to know more:
C# VS2010 Entering break mode failed
The fix for the error in the above thread also resulted in the intellisense starting to work again.
I fixed this problem by removing Sybase Power Designer VS extension.
You can try to disable other extensions.
Exactly the same issue, though would appear only on certain projects (even within a single solution).
Removing the *.*proj.user file (e.g. *.csproj.user) for the projects in question properly reset the missing features ("Go To Definition", "Organize Usings", Intellisense on certain types, etc).
In our case, I suspect this happens sometimes when we switch branches with an SCM that uses a single working directory (like git). If setup properly, it wouldn't track *.user* files but that means that if there are incompatible changes in it across different branches, you need to regenerate it.
So of course the "sometimes" would depend on the current branch and the next branch.
Unfortunately I don't see a very good solution if that's the case. Sometimes you really want to keep the user settings across branches if they're compatible, sometimes you want to regenerate them unconditionally. Ideally, you might even want to only change parts of them when switching, while keeping other parts.
If you never need to keep them and are fine with regenerating them every time, then you can configure your SCM to always remove these files while switching branches (e.g. using hooks for git). This is a pretty naive solution however, doing it more universally correctly would require a smarter system (aware of the semantics behind the .user files and capable of capturing/prompting user intent when needed).
save, close and reopen the source file you are working on. This works every time for me.
Try to add the statement:
<%# Page Language="vb" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeBehind="Default.aspx.vb" Inherits="IP_Updater.Default" %>
...at beginning of your page. The above example is applied for page Default.aspx written in VB.NET.
This is the problem related to Microsoft MSDN , your MSDN might be getting some problem. The solutions to this is uninstall MSDN and then re-install . before going for this make sure that you system is free from virus attack.
Hope that after doing , the Microsoft Intellisense will start running
When I look at the following folders, they are exteremely large.
C:\Users\MyName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio (12GB)
C:\Users\MyName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio.bak (36GB)
What is VisualStudio.bak folder for? Can I delete VisualStudio.bak folder (since it has bak extension)?
Thanks in advance!
Answer: I found similar post here.
ReflectedSchemas folder in the user's AppData folder (Visual Studio)
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mikhailarkhipov/archive/2004/05/14/131949.aspx
Short Answer: Yes, they are backup files created by Visual Studio for Auto Recovery.
Long Answer:
Let me explain, this is a visual studio feature to recover your solution files wherever something bad happens, and really you should keep this in mind. That auto recover can save you a lot of time when something on your system goes wrong, for example, if you laptop battery suddenly dies on you ‘seen that, done that…’
Visual studio simply creates an backup of your files with the extension .bak, you can try opening the files and see that it’s just a backup of an solution file.
But, if you keep your solution on source control you can save some time by disabling this feature, here’s how.
You need to deselect the AutoRecover setting to stop backup files if from being created:
Go to Tools->Options->Environment->AutoRecover (check that the “Show All Settings” is enabled) and just uncheck the AutoRecover option.
Tools -> Option
At this point you can clean the solution, just make a search in solution directory on your disk and delete every .bak file.
And that’s it, from now visual studio will stop creating that pesky files on your solution, but keep in mind that this is a feature to help you in case something wrong happens, but if you are connected to a source control it can save you some time and spare working in you solution.
I've run into a problem with VS2010 (it also exists in the latest version, SP1 (10.0.40219.1)):
Add an existing Word file to the "Solution Items" and check this new file in.
Check the file out for editing
Double click on the file and edit it in Word (just make some minor changes)
Save the file (CTRL-S)
Now the file is removed from the "Solution Items" in Visual Studio (you may have to repeat the editing and saving a couple of times)
Update: I'm using Visual SourceSafe 2005.
Despite my research efforts I haven't really found anything on this issue apart from this Microsoft page, and I'd like to know whether there is a way to prevent this problem from happening.
Any ideas are more than welcome, thanks in advance.
G.
After further investigation I think I found the reason behind this behaviour and a workaround.
Please also note that the behaviour described in the original question only occurs for files that are added directly underneath a solution or to a folder that is directly underneath a solution.
The reason
I'm not sure whether the following is 100% correct, but the main point is how Word (and probably other MS Office apps as well) saves an existing file:
Save the current version of the file to a temporary file
Rename the original file so it can be used later in case something goes wrong
Copy the temporary file to the location of the original file, using the original file's name
Delete the original file (that was renamed in step 2)
Visual Studio picks up that the file doesn't exist (for a very short time though) and removes it from its tree and the .sln file. This can also be reproduced by manually adding any kind of file, checking it out (if not checked out), renaming it to a different name and then back to its original name => file is no longer shown in Visual Studio.
The workaround
I've created an empty project template following the steps on Microsoft's site. I also set the output to "Class Library" so that the project would compile even if no static main method exists. This template can be used to add a "Documentation" project to an existing solution. Underneath this project you can add files and edit them as you wish, as Visual Studio behaves differently and does not remove the file when it is saved in this constellation.
Obviously this approach is still not very satisfying or elegant, but I hope that it may be helpful for others who might run into the same problem.
G.
I've run into the same issue. I simply undo changes for the solution after I've closed the document file and the solution files will be as they originally were before your document changes.